Authorship and First-Person Allegory in Late Medieval France and England by Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath (review)

This book makes an important contribution to late medieval literary studies by pointing out—to what will surely be some readers’ surprise, and certainly most readers’ edification—the vital significance of the French allegorical tradition to the development of the canon of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English poetry, at least insofar as that canon is represented by Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate. Chaucer’s interest in the Romance of the Rose, part of which he translated, is something of which we have long been aware, and seminal works like Charles Muscatine’s Chaucer and the French Tradition (1957) taught us just how much the poet learned from his fellow writers across the Channel. Unlike Muscatine’s, however, Kamath’s intertextual study is less about style than it is about substance. Over the course of an introduction and four chapters, she demonstrates that it was not only in the Rose, but also, and just as importantly, in the three spiritual pilgrimage allegories of the French Benedictine Guillaume de Deguileville (himself inspired and influenced by the Rose), that English poets “found a model for representing their literary activity and interrelations” (3). This model, Kamath argues, is allegorical not only because the French poems are themselves allegories, but also because they and their Middle English descendants demand that readers interpret the figure of the author who appears within his text and speaks in the first person as narrator-protagonist; this kind of allegory, she writes, thus “provides a means of envisioning the relationships of an author to literary activity, to other authors, and to readers” (13).

The first chapter lays out Jean de Meun’s representational strategies for figuring authorship within the Rose itself—particularly his self-naming by way of the allegorical character of Love—and then explores how Deguileville responded to those strategies in turn, rejecting the Rose’s erotic focus even as he adopted some of its most intriguing literary moves. For Kamath, “the interpretation-inviting placement of proper names in the mouths of personifications” used by both poets becomes “a significant method of marking authorial identity within allegorical narrative” (36), so that “the actions, attributes, and embedded texts associated with the narrator-protagonist become a vehicle for envisioning the vernacular author” in both the French and the later English tradition (56).

This is a big argument, and it must be said that in the chapters that follow Kamath never quite articulates just what the vernacular author is ultimately envisioned to be, or just what lesson readers might have been meant to learn from the way poets chose to represent themselves with(in) their texts. In other words, while Kamath argues that medieval readers were consistently invited to interpret the relationship of late medieval authors to their poems, she herself tends to shy away from offering any such interpretation, perhaps coming closest when she remarks that her book “reveals how valorizing notions of authorship came to be more widely applicable” (3) and how the allegories and allegorical moments she studies “direct attention not only to universal truths beyond the text, but also to authorial identity and to the interactive process of poetic production” (63). These are things I would like to have heard more about, but Kamath is prevented somewhat from addressing them fully by virtue of her methodology of close reading, which focuses on “the uses of allusion, citation, and translation within texts, rather than on external timelines” (1). As she asserts, hers is not a book that seeks to look at the “social, political, geographic, and economic contexts surrounding textual production,” but rather one that “show[s] how a tradition of allegory . . . invites interpretation of the authors engaged in its production and of their relationships to one another” (2). This insistent reminder of history’s absence (repeated several times in the book) does not serve Kamath’s fine scholarship particularly well. A little more historical...